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Collision pays for your car, not your injuries

Question:
My son was driving a car for his friend, and he ran off the road
and crashed after overcorrecting. My son now has a cracked
rib. Will the car owner's collision insurance cover him and
his hospital bills? My son has no auto or health insurance of
his own to cover him.

Since your son doesn't have car or health insurance of his own
to help pay his medical bills, he needs to find out what auto
insurance coverages the car owner may have that will.

While
bodily injury liability
is required in most states to be carried by a car owner, it won't
help your son. If he had injured people outside of the
vehicle he was driving, this coverage would help them, but it
doesn't him in any way since he was the at-fault driver in this
incident.

If you are in a no-fault state, it is likely the car owner's
personal injury protection
(PIP) would cover your son, up to the limits of the policy. There
may be a deductible due. PIP normally covers not only the
insured, but passengers or other authorized drivers of the insured
vehicle.

If you have PIP coverage on your own car and your son lives in
your household, then you can also check to see if it would extend
to him as a family member even though he was not in one of
your vehicles when he was injured.

If you don't live in a
no-fault state
, then if the car owner has medical payments coverage it may extend
to your son since he was an authorized driver of the vehicle at the
time of the accident.

You may find out that the car owner doesn't have any medical
coverages on her auto insurance policy that will pay for your son's
medical expenses. If that is the case, he will be left to pay
for the bills related to his cracked rib on his own.

It can get even worse.

Since it was a single-car accident and your son was behind the
wheel, he would normally be found at-fault and thus liable for the
damages he caused. This means if the car owner can't file a
collision claim for the car's damages, she may look to your son for
the cost of repairs, or the actual cash value of the car if it were
totaled in the accident.

Your son should check to make sure that the car owner can make a
collision claim for damages to her vehicle. Typically,
collision coverage will extend beyond the car owner and to others
that have permission to operate the insured vehicle.

If your son hit anything else with the friend's car when he ran
off the road, such as a guardrail, then the owner's property damage
liability coverage should cover that, up to the limits of her
policy.

It may be a burden to pay these expenses, but since
overcorrecting has been said to make up more than 4 percent of auto
accident fatalities each year, he should be happy that he was able
to walk away from this wreck.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

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